The career in poetry of Peter Viereck, perhaps more than that of any other writer of our time, can be viewed as an experiment in the symbiosis of poetry and politics. The New Cultural Blues, his best satire, draws on a complex linguistic and sociological intelligence. I can't recall when, if ever, these two cultures (language and social science) have been embraced by a more consolidating sensibility. His best satires are memorable events in the history of ideas, without loss of art.

Viereck's earliest poetry served him as an extension of political consciousness into a medium in which paramount ideas of our era could be abstracted from their worrisome contexts in international affairs and viewed freshly and intrinsically through the symbolic machinery of art. Poetry later became for Viereck a mind-style for escaping the risks of socio-political consciousness in playful, if ingenious, literary word-puzzles. But in his most recent work, in going still further beyond literal reality, Viereck returns to full human force and wholeness. Enacted before our eyes in "Five Walks on the Edge" is the drama of aspiring spirit in search of the mindlessness of supra-being, the poet attaining a larger totality of mind than ever before in "Counter-Walk, Reversals," the superb poem that ends the book. Foregoing his former escape of spiritual transcendence, there is a new toughness in immanence, identification with the indwelling natural forces in rivers, trees, cliffs, rock, mud. In "River," a voyage of man's spirit is symbolized, but an equal interest is generated in the sheer fun of letting the river be itself, speak its being, act out its life of surfaces, appearances: nothing is but what can be seen, touched, poured. If the poet's mental life, a see-sawing fluid motion, is particularized and embodied in the river's cycles, his fascination with the actual properties of the river is so intense it threatens to steal attention away from its symbolic value. It is a vision in which we feel "body is not bruised to pleasure soul", nor ideas lost to things. No portion of sensibility is sacrificed or compromised to any other. The political man is perfecting his anti-self in apolitical forms and spirits in nature.

I'm particularly struck with the original design of this book, the organization taking account of Viereck's development as a cyclic eternal return to key themes, an ascent along many separate spirals: not a mere chronology. This method of arrangement befits Viereck's work more than it would the work of most other poets, but all can profit by the example—especially in what it tells of a man's style of guiding the growth of his art over a thirty-year period.